A nuance right away: these are only very small differences, says research leader Gwenaëlle Douaud of the University of Oxford. And those differences can also be different per person.
There is an average of 0.2 to 2 percentage points extra brain loss on top of the damage that people incur over the years, let the researcher know† People react a little more slowly to puzzle games, she says, which shows an influence on ‘the processing speed and the executive functions of the brain’.
Before vaccination
According to the research, it does not matter whether you have been in hospital with corona or whether you have endured your infection at home. The research was done in the first year of the pandemic, before most people were vaccinated.
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Research leader Douaud looked at brain scans of about eight hundred Britons between the ages of 50 and 80 who are participating in a long-term medical study. Half of them received corona during the study period, the other half did not.
Memory
The researchers found 65 abnormalities in ex-corona patients, compared to people who had not been infected. These are very small differences in various brain regions. One of them is related to memory.
It remains to be seen whether the brain mass will recover. That will only become clear later.
Don’t dramatize
Professor of brain science David Linden of Maastricht University has also read the research and says in de Volkskrant that much is still unclear.
“It is important not to underestimate the long-term consequences of corona. But you should not dramatize this either. The extent to which this is relevant for the functioning of the people involved is not yet known.”
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